Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering

Location: Norwich, York or Eastleigh

Salary: Circa - £120,000

This is a great job for someone who loves shaping large-scale engineering strategy and influencing how complex transformation programmes deliver real value.
Are you someone who thrives on making big decisions, balancing competing priorities, and guiding multiple teams toward high‑quality engineering outcomes?

Do you enjoy working across cloud modernisation, engineering standards, and delivery governance—and helping teams grow their capability along the way?

This role would suit someone with significant experience in modern engineering leadership—ideally with a background in large-scale cloud migration, modernisation, or multi-team technology delivery. It’s a great opportunity for someone ready to step into a broad programme-wide remit, where your decisions shape cost, risk, operability, and customer impact across Aviva.

A bit about the job:

You’ll play a central role within a large-scale modernisation initiative, ensuring engineering decisions are consistent, secure, scalable, and aligned to our long‑term technology direction. The purpose of this role is to set and steward the engineering strategy that keeps our customers safe, strengthens our delivery predictability, and accelerates our move to modern, cloud-native platforms.

You will be setting the strategy for DC Exit and Modernisation, defining and governing engineering standards, delivery practices and technology decisions, and managing engineering risk. It oversees internal and third‑party engineering quality, embeds security, operability and performance from the start, and balances delivery speed with long‑term sustainability and technical‑debt reduction. Through strong governance, clear patterns, and capability uplift, the role drives consistent, high‑quality engineering outcomes that reduce risk, improve stability, and enable the programme to scale safely while protecting customer trust.

You’ll work alongside programme, architecture, security, and delivery leaders to make cross-cutting decisions on implementation, migration approaches, engineering standards, third‑party quality, and risk. Ultimately, you’ll be accountable for the engineering integrity of the transformation —driving quality, reducing defects, and ensuring the programme delivers with confidence.

Skills and experience we’re looking for:

• Strong engineering leadership experience, ideally gained in large-scale digital transformation or cloud modernisation (e.g., rehost/replatform/refactor programmes).
• Proven ability to set engineering strategy, standards, and governance to drive consistency across multi-team or multi-supplier environments.
• Deep practical understanding of modern SDLC practices—such as trunk-based development, CI/CD, automated testing, and quality gates.
• Experience making complex, cross-team engineering decisions involving trade-offs across cost, risk, performance, operability, and delivery timelines.
• Ability to challenge, influence, and coach both internal teams and third-party suppliers to raise engineering capability, quality, and accountability

What you’ll get for this role:

Our purpose - with you today, for a better tomorrow – is a promise we make to our colleagues too.  And one of the ways we live up to that promise is by investing in you.  We have so much to offer when it comes to being an Aviva colleague.

• Bonus opportunity – 25% of annual salary. Actual amount depends on your performance and Aviva’s.

• Generous pension scheme - Aviva will contribute up to 14%, depending on what you put in.

• 29 days holiday plus bank holidays, and you can choose to buy or sell up to 5 days

• Aviva-funded Private Medical Benefit to help you get expert support when you need it

• Make your money go further - Up to 40% discount on Aviva products, and other retailer discounts

• Up to £1,200 of free Aviva shares per year through our Matching Share Plan and share in the success of Aviva with our Save As You Earn scheme

• Brilliantly supportive policies including parental and carer’s leave

• Flexible benefits to suit you, including sustainability options such as cycle to work

• Make a difference, be part of our Aviva Communities and use your 3 paid volunteering days to help others

• We take your wellbeing seriously with lots of support and tools

Take a look to learn more.  Put a salary into this calculator to see what your total Aviva Reward could be.

Aviva is for everyone:

We’re inclusive and welcome everyone – we want applications from all backgrounds and experiences. Excited but not sure you tick every box? Even if you don’t, we would still encourage you to apply. We also consider all forms of flexible working, including part time and job shares.

We flex locations, hours and working patterns to suit our customers, business, and you. Most of our people are smart working – spending around 50% of their time in our offices every week - combining the benefits of flexibility, with time together with colleagues.

To find out more about working at Aviva take a look here

We’d love it if you could submit your application online. If you require an alternative method of applying, please give Chloe Nettley a call on 07795207964 or send an email to chloe.nettley@aviva.com